Media Room

January Development News

We’ve been busy making changes and improvements throughout December and January.

Here are some of the highlights:

Transferred 70% of sites to version control so changes made by integrators can be tracked, undone and reviewed before being pushed live for every centre

Introduced a new rewrites application to handle URL redirections

Improved single sign on reliability and speed

There have been some significant improvements made around retail due to an ongoing project

Bulk emails can now be sent much faster for newly created applications

Enhancements

We’ve introduced two major payment enhancements. Firstly, you are now able to set up multiple fee choices for form payments. Previously, different fees (for example, if a user wanted to subscribe to a magazine) had to be displayed in individual forms. Now, the fee itself has its own section within the form, so a single form can have levels of fees (e.g. 12-month magazine subscription). We’ve also added in Stripe as a payment gateway.

Secondly, the CyberSource payment gateway has been updated to use Akamai CDN. A CDN distributes content across the globe, so when you’re communicating with the website it only has to go to the nearest POP (access point to the Internet). If the nearest POP for us is in Melbourne, but the site is based in the US, we save about 250 milliseconds per request. The Akamai CDN is the best CDN there is, and it has the most POPs. By using this for processing payments, we’re ensuring that they’re processed quicker. As we know, every second counts in ecommerce.

We’ve significantlyimproved single sign on to better detect centre domain. We used to store information in a user’s setting that could cause issues if the setting was changed as we’d have to wait for the user’s session to timeout, but we have now fixed this issue.

There have been several improvements and bug fixes to address some of the problems with the Rewrites Application (previously known as the Redirections Application). These include a URL tester, redirection loop detection, a single redirection for multiple rules, and bulk rule imports.

We have alsoimproved Adlogic timeout handling and added functionality to test if Adlogic is down.

The favicon (little icon in the browser tab) is now configurable from centre metadata. Here’s some documentation about Metadata.

We also improved Git error recovery. As an overview, currently integrators use FTP to move sites to live. This has a few shortfalls, including no history of who made what change; it can lead to breakage if only part of a site is uploaded; and it is generally unfriendly. Most of these shortfalls can be addressed by moving to repositories for integrators. Core dna currently supports three providers and while set up is slightly different, the overall process is the same:

Set up repository (add deployment key and webhook)

Remove residency host

Set up repository in centre management

Push a change

We enabled more fields to be sent to Sparkroom from Form Creator.

Advanced search for the retail application has also been improved.

Bulk emails can now be sent much fasterfor newly created applications.

Another important enhancement – Core dna has a new site! The development team worked around the clock to launch this fresh new website. We even published a post explaining why we needed a new site. We’re still working on making the site better; in terms of functionality, UX, and information.

Bugs fixes

There were a couple of small bugs in the Ecommerce application, which have now been fixed. Those bugs were that purely numeric slugs for product catalogue items were not allowed, and not being able to search product catalogue by product id.

That’s it for this month’s development updates. Do you have any enhancement ideas you’d like to see in Core dna? Please let us know on our Facebook page or Tweet us with #CorednaSupport